The Human-Readable Encryption Key

"One of the problems with encryption keys," notes Steve, "is that they're generally just a set of bytes, and humans can't read bytes. While one could certainly represent those bytes with a hexadecimal string, or even a little base64, it still looks like machine-language gobbledygook."

"Fortunately, VMware's Customization Specification Manager was able to solve this problem through the power of XML. Behold the encryptionKey and its simple, human-readable XML representation."